First Vulkan Performance Results

Using my box test of over 100,000 boxes, I can compare performance in the new engine using OpenGL and Vulkan side by side. The results are astounding.

Our new engine uses extensive multithreading to perform culling and rendering on separate threads, bringing down the time the GPU sits around waiting for the CPU to nearly zero.

Hardware: Nvidia GEForce GTX 1070 (notebook)

OpenGL: ~380 FPS

Vulkan 700+ FPS. FRAPS does not work with Vulkan, so the only FPS counter I have is the Steam one, and the text is very small.

Vulkan clearly alleviates the data transfer bottleneck the OpenGL version experiences. I am not using a depth buffer in the Vulkan renderer yet, and I expect that will further increase the speed. I'm very happy with these results and I think exclusively relying on Vulkan in the future, together with our new engine designed for modern graphics hardware, will give us great outcomes.

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Our new engine makes speed gains in a different way and I don't think Vulkan will make anything faster at all, honestly, over what the engine could do with OpenGL 4.3. We already have zero driver overhead, but Vulkan is more widely supported and the brand is synonymous with speed in the customer's mind. I know this because when I talk to people in person the first thing they say is "does it use Vulkan?"

It will be a lot faster than Leadwerks 4 but so was the OpenGL implementation.

Using Vulkan does not automatically make anything faster. No one will listen to me if I try to argue with that, which is fine, because I am just going to let everyone else mess up and I will make the fastest engine.

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So, do you wish to take back that statement or did you now find other ways to optimize that were not possible in the OpenGL implementation?

Anyway, I'm happy, you decided to go with Vulkan

Yes, there are still speed gains that Vulkan provided. Most of the performance increase we are seeing here is due to a new architecture, but Vulkan did increase performance an addition 80% on top of what was already achieved. So apparently there was additional driver overhead that could be removed.

I did not expect Vulkan would increase performance so much, but I guess since we are already very optimal we were able to really take advantage of the reduced overhead.